At Velvet rope, rebel with a camera fights for his rights

NEW YORK — On a midweek evening this month, the photographer Steve Sands went where he should not have -- to the Ziegfeld Theater, in Midtown Manhattan, for a gala screening of the new Beyonce documentary, “Life Is but a Dream.”

By NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

capecodtimes.com

By NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Posted Feb. 23, 2013 at 3:46 PM
Updated Feb 23, 2013 at 3:48 PM

By NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Posted Feb. 23, 2013 at 3:46 PM
Updated Feb 23, 2013 at 3:48 PM

» Social News

NEW YORK — On a midweek evening this month, the photographer Steve Sands went where he should not have: to the Ziegfeld Theater, in Midtown Manhattan, for a gala screening of the new Beyonce documentary, “Life Is but a Dream.”

Sands, who is sometimes called New York's most notorious paparazzo, had been barred from the event by HBO but showed up nonetheless.

Armed with his Canon and a smartphone set to video (it was poking from the pocket of his camera bag), Sands, 56, hurried through the marquee lights toward a gleaming white pavilion, perfectly aware that his efforts to get in would be denied. But getting in was not his mission; his mission was to record the facts of rejection. Indeed, as he approached the velvet ropes, the first guard at the check-in desk told him, as expected, that he was not allowed inside.

“Come on, Steve,” the guard complained. “You know why. And you know you can't just stand there. So what do you want to do?”

Since the early 1980s, Sands has been scrambling for access to the A-list, a job that has caused him, more or less perpetually, to be bum-rushed out of restaurants, chucked from fancy parties, forcibly escorted off movie sets and kicked to nightclub curbs. But after 35 years of these occupational hazards, two events this winter pushed him over the edge.

The first was in January when the police revoked his press card after he purportedly disobeyed them while shooting the celebrity season premiere of the TV series “Girls.” Then, two weeks ago, he was arrested and charged with assault and disorderly conduct while taking pictures, without credentials, of the cast of “Smash” — a show on NBC — as they filmed at a set in the heart of Times Square.

According to a criminal complaint, an officer with the Police Department's Movie/TV Unit saw Sands entering “an unauthorized location” on the set and tried four times to chase him away. When Sands protested that he was entering a designated press tent, there was a scuffle, during which, the complaint contends, he flailed his arms and hurt the officer's hand.

Energized by these events, Sands responded with what he often calls his “civil-rights campaign.” He has been showing up at celebrity affairs across the city not to seek out movie stars or rappers, but to document what he says is the exploitation that he and his colleagues face.

One day during Fashion Week, for instance, he dropped by a private show at the Calvin Klein warehouse on West 39th Street in the garment district. Instead of taking pictures, like everyone else, of the fashion editors and supermodels strolling through the door, he turned his lens on the grizzled herd of photographers penned in on the street by metal fences.

“Do you see these people?” Sands said, in a piteous tone. “Look at them — they're broken. They don't even know they're being abused.”

Beyond such “reconnaissance,” as he is wont to call it, Sands has written letters to local politicians, informing them of his abridged First Amendment rights and his perceived mistreatment by a conspiratorial nexus of the police and the publicity establishment. In one such letter, sent to Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer of Manhattan, he criticized the city for its “privatization of public spaces,” citing in particular the annual New Year's Eve extravaganza in Times Square.

“Just getting to the media area was fraught with hassles,” Sands wrote, “as most of the NYPD claimed that we needed a 'special Times Sq. Alliance pass.' There is no law in the City Charter or Rules that give them the authority to do so.”

Reached by phone the other day, Brewer said that she had indeed received and considered Sands' letter — and that it was not all she had received. “Depending on what's going on, I may get up to 10 emails a day from him,” she said.

It is hard to know where all this outrage and activity is headed. Sands maintains that the police spend too much time chasing professionals with cameras and has hinted at an omnibus federal filing, fleshing out the supposedly collusive connections among City Hall, publicity firms and entertainment companies, like HBO. But then, one man's collusion is another man's event permit.

Whatever happens, one thing is for certain: Sands, who was born in the Bronx and is truculent by nature (“I'm outspoken,” he acknowledged, “and I'm known to be outspoken”), did not set out to be a photographic freedom fighter — or even a photographer, he says. He took his first shot of a boldface name when he was 24 and a failed student of astrophysics.

As he recalls the occasion, he was walking past a movie set one day and happened to snap a picture of the actor James Caan. He later sold the picture, for $70, to The Associated Press.

Over the next few decades, he gradually established himself as a successful freelance shooter, and these days, between efforts as an agent provocateur, he works on actual assignments. Just last week, he photographed the actor Colin Farrell — without incident — at the band shell in Central Park on the set of the movie “Winter's Tale,” and the following morning he took a few shots of the actress Jennifer Connelly near the J&R computer store downtown.

Sands says he makes over $100,000 in his best years and claims to be regarded by celebrities as an honest paparazzo — a label, by the way, that he abhors.

“The real bloodsucking, scum-of-the-earth types chase people on the streets,” he said dismissively.

“I never chase anyone — ever,” he insisted. “I just don't get in people's faces.”

It seems, however, that he does tend to get into certain restricted areas where — at least in the view of the authorities — he does not belong. Last spring, for example, Alec Baldwin's private guards expelled Sands from a sidewalk in Little Italy while he was taking pictures, without express permission, of Baldwin's wedding. Numerous video clips exist of Sands fleeing from security personnel at black-tie functions and mixing it up with uniformed officers on the street.

All of which has contributed to his notorious reputation, one that perhaps achieved its height some years ago when The New York Press included him on its annual blacklist of the 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers. “What can I say? I was in good company,” Sands said. (Katie Couric and Eliot Spitzer were also on the list.) “My position is simple: I have a right to be disliked, but I also have a right to take pictures.”

Of course, Sands was not taking pictures at the Beyonce film premiere a couple of weeks ago — or at least not of anybody famous. After he was shut out by security, he stormed across the street and started snapping photos of his fellow paparazzi imprisoned in their press pen. Standing at the curb, he tried to rouse this jaded group into joining him in his cause, prowling back and forth like a rebel at the barricades in 1968.

“I'm going to stop all this!” he said. “The City of New York is getting sued! Who's with me? Is anybody with me? Are you men?”

At the height of his oration, one of the photographers suddenly looked up and said, “She's here!” And indeed there she was: Beyonce arriving in an Escalade.

The pack of paparazzi scurried off, shoving, shouting, their shutter motors whirring — and Sands was temporarily left without an audience.